A second American woman, Jamie Paulin-Ramirez, 31, has been arrested in that plot to murder a cartoonist who depicted Muhammad. The other woman is Colleen R. LaRose, 46, AKA "JihadJane."

I find it especially hard to understand an American deciding to kill a cartoonist. I can understand how someone coming from our culture could become consumed with anti-government passion adopt a violent path aimed at government targets. And I understand the religious path toward violence and can see that strand in American culture too. And I know converts can be the most passionate religionists. Religionists might aim at private citizens. (I'm thinking of the pro-lifers who've targeted abortion doctors.) But still, going against a cartoonist. How can that happen?

On Sept. 11, she suddenly left Leadville, Colo., a small town in the Rocky Mountains, for Denver, then for New York, to meet and marry a Muslim man she connected with online, her family says. Ms. Paulin-Ramirez, who is 5-foot-11 and blonde, phoned her mother and stepfather in Leadville, providing them with an address in Waterford, Ireland, they say.

I suppose she was drawn in by the passionate intensity of the man, and he came up with the specifics. Killing a cartoonist... it was exotic... erotic.

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The zeal of the new convert. Wahabbi terrorist recruiters search out vulnerable people,and then get them converted to their version of Islam,and then con them into getting involved in terrorist schemes.

Relatives of Ms. Paulin-Ramirez said they're distressed because her son was with her in Ireland. The boy's father is Mexican and hasn't seen the child in about 5 years, said George Mott, Ms. Paulin-Ramirez's stepfather, who lives in Leadville with her mother. Mr. Mott, a convert to Islam himself, says he went to Denver to find his stepdaughter but couldn't track her down.

But the religious zeal came before she hooked up with the Algerian, and it seems that he was husband #4. The article says that she wanted to wear a hajib to her father's funeral in Kansas, and that all happened before she took off to meet Mr. Wonderful. The religious zeal explains how she came to hook up with him, not the other way around.

Exotic/erotic doesn't fit. She sounds like someone who was desperate to believe in something, and latched on to Islam to fill the bill, after having tried some other stuff.

Reading this, I was wondering how much this woman's personality might have in common with another midwesterner woman who famously marched to an equally odd drummer, ended up attached to a Muslim man and took off for a strange life in a strange land -- Obama's mother. In the '60s, her story played out differently -- jihadi terrorism and murder weren't all the rage then, but Franz Fanon and others like him were.

Ann writes another post today about the hippie-dippie '60s. But that one and this one share a common if weird connection.

Jihad refers to "the struggle" and the Islamist jihadists and the Weather Underground and the liberals all share the same struggle. They all wish to destroy the United States and everything it stands for.

Ew, that Lars Vilks, he draws a skritchy-skratchy picture of Mohammad, PBUH, as an rondellhund and that flat pisses me off. Blasphemy! He knows how offensive that is. Does the man have no morals? No ethics? I'm going to pop a cap in his ass and teach EVERYONE a lesson. Plus this Algerian guy, whatshisname here, told me to.

Legalism is the easy way to grab some pride in one's self worth and identity as a person. That is why it is the enemy of the message of his sacrifice brought and performed by the Jewish prophet Jesus, and since then desperately hidden and slandered by every legalistic, miserable, iron cruel religion such as the revelation by the angel given to Mohamed in a cave. Christians have to win their own ongoing war with this false way to relate to God. Nobody ever keeps that "Law of Sin and Death", but they will murder others as a substitute work to win credit with the condemning god that put them under that law without knowing the free way of escape.

I'm reading the Simon Montefiore biography, Young Stalin. In his youth Stalin was a rather romantic revolutionary figure, robbing banks, living as a fugitive, even pirating a ship. It would seem to be a miserable existence, but the plus side of the underground is that everyone had an active and exciting sex life. There's something about the presence of mortal danger and unlawful activities that heightens the libido Perhaps these sad, confused women should be looked upon not so much as terrorists, but as perverts.

'Religious' is not the same as 'ideological', even though both of them can be faith-based. It's a false equation that obscures more than it illuminates.

Agreed. Confusing the two is the same sort of logic that, for example, Christopher Hitchens uses to claim that Communist totalitarianism was a religious movement and therefore should be considered to be a mark against religion rather than atheism, because (to use his phrase) religion poisons everything.

"I especially like her on-line comment "stop calling Muslims TERRORISTS." Then she left Colorado to learn how to murder a Danish cartoonist."

They don't see their murderous ways as being terrorism. To them, it's a means to an end.

Look at Victoria, the commenter a few posts above. I've linked her to authoritative sources demonstrating to her that real live domestic terrorists ... people who have actually bombed the Pentagon ... people who have murdered for their cause ... these people are walking free in her community and she's scared not of them in the least.

She's scared of commenter on the internet instead of a real live domestic terrorist who is a friend of her President.

I find it especially hard to understand an American deciding to kill a cartoonist. I can understand how someone coming from our culture could become consumed with anti-government passion adopt a violent path aimed at government targets.

"Ah yes, the white sepera... er white supremists."

And I understand the religious path toward violence and can see that strand in American culture too.

"Those ignorant rednecks with their guns and their religion"

And I know converts can be the most passionate religionists. Religionists might aim at private citizens.

"Those wingnuts that murder doctors"

But still, going against a cartoonist. How can that happen. How can that happen?

"Muslims are barbaric, and Americans are too sophisticated to be so stupid.

Ann, you're straining your Indocrination. Just remember that Islam is a religion of Peace and everything will be fine" - CNN/NYTs/WaPo

The Baader-Meinhof complex. Desperately wanting to be "the Other", and/or desperately wanting to be an actual Nazi killer, yet when they're are no Nazis, thereby making themselves the Nazis in the end.

This is of course vile slander against right-thinking and right-behaving pro-life activists, virtually all of whom have never, ever threatened violence against anyone, much less engaged in violence.

You know full well that despite the intensity of emotion around the murder of unborn babies, pro-life activists have been virtually spotless in their behavior.

How could you possibly equate or relate in any way pro-life activists with Muslim/Islamist nimrods who would travel across the Atlantic Ocean the the intent to murder a cartoonist? This is moral and intellectual nonsense of the highest order.

You can cut off your thumb and three fingers of your right hand and then use the remaining fingers to count the number of acts of violence perpetrated by so-called pro-life activists. And you know this.

Really, Althouse ... you must have been thinking with your vagina to make this kind of conclusion.